With an idea of separateness firmly ingrained in the colonial psyche, American officials from the outset constructed a mode of government in "Moroland" that served to detach the Muslim South from the embryonic Filipino polity.

The assumptions encoded by this American census scheme foreshadowed two important characteristics of colonial rule in Mindanao and Sulu. First, Americans would feel compelled to educate the inhabitants in the ways of democracy and government. Given the undeveloped level of civilization among these "wild" tribes, American military officials like General Davis could declare in 1901 that "there is no civilized inhabitant of the Philippine Islands, American, Spanish, or Filipino, who would even suggest that the Moros are capable of civilized and enlightened self-government, for a government of law—i.e., regulated liberty is absolutely unknown to and unthinkable by them."47 Such deficiencies made it incumbent upon Americans to furnish these benighted souls with tutelage in the ways of political democracy. In a 1902 report, the Director of the American Bureau for Non-Christian, David P. Barrows, reflected such sentiments when he enunciated that "the objects of this bureau" is "to investigate the actual condition of these pagan and Mohammedan tribes, and to recommend legislation for their civil government."48 In many respects, this prescription did not diverge from American plans elsewhere in the archipelago. A copious literature documents the project of tutelage in Manila, where colonial authorities embarked on a long term strategy to nurture democratic practices among Christian Filipinos and prepare them for self-government at some hazy point in the future.49 "Legislation" for the "civil government" of "Mohammedan tribes" would seem of a piece with this. But a key distinction did arise from the perception of difference between Christians and Muslims. In that same report, Barrows subtly excluded the Muslims of Mindanao and Sulu from the rest of the colony by stating that "there are seven great tribes of Christians which form politically and socially the Filipino people, and the Mohammedan Malays, or Moros of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago."50 The "Moros," essentially, did not appertain to the "Christians which form politically and socially the Filipino people." While not universally held, this understanding of difference was an article of faith among many Americans working in the Philippines.51

With an idea of separateness firmly ingrained in the colonial psyche, American officials from the outset constructed a mode of government in "Moroland" that served to detach the Muslim South from the embryonic Filipino polity. Philippine Commission Act No. 787, or the 1903 "Act Providing for the Organization and the Government of the Moro Province,"52 functioned as the cornerstone of this entity Patricio Abinales termed "a regime within a regime."53 Most notably, the Act stipulated that the Moro Province would fall under the direct jurisdiction of the Civil Governor of the Philippine Islands and the Philippine Commission. It also vested the Civil Governor in Manila with the authority to appoint, "by and with the consent of Philippine Commission," a whole sleuth of local officials including the provincial governor, secretary, treasurer, attorney, engineer, and superintendent of schools.54 And it further mandated that the provincial governor, and many of the subordinate positions, be American military officers. Such provisions stood in stark contrast to political innovations elsewhere in the colony. As Michael Cullinane details in his monograph Illustrado Politics, the American authorities had already devolved appreciable power to local figures in Luzon and the Visayans by 1902, where an indigenous, albeit limited, franchise elected municipal officials. These municipal politicos in turn selected the provincial government.55 And though the occupying army forces still exerted considerable influence, they did not interfere in these local arrangements most of the time.56 Nothing of this sort would come to pass in Mindanao and Sulu before 1914.

The juridical decoupling of "Moroland" from the rest of the American colony had substantive repercussions for the early governance of Mindanao and Sulu. Infrastructure policy offers one telling example. Although the military did pursue some road and communications projects in other parts of the archipelago, its efforts in Mindanao were unparalleled. Soldiers built a grid of roads, telegraph lines, military outposts and naval patrols that became the largest in the Philippines, enabling methodical military campaigns against the sporadic rebellions of the early years, and then connecting the diverse collection of Muslims on the island into a more integrated island community.57

This impressive revenue base, which departed significantly from the fiscal norms of other Filipino provinces, would seemingly secure Mindanao and Sulu with a solid underpinning for autonomy from the rest of the colony.

Beyond infrastructure, economic policy affords an even more instructive glimpse into the import of Moroland's political structure. Intent on keeping Mindanao and Sulu at a remove from the rest of the colony, military authorities encouraged self-sufficiency in the area and, surprisingly, went pretty far out of its way to discourage commercial ties with other Filipino areas. For instance, military authorities sanctioned "Moro Exchange" markets that conspicuously barred Chinese or "Filipino" participation, thereby stimulating the growth of internal trade within the province. The army governors also attempted to divert the exchange that flourished between Muslim port cities like Cotabato and Filipino centers like Manila and Cebu by renewing the right of Muslims to trade with Borneo, Singapore, and even Australia. The Americans did not grant other Filipinos these opportunities. And lastly, United States soldiers fostered the spectacular rise of the hitherto non-existent hemp industry, as forty-two plantations produced over 8,592 tons of the staple by 1911.58 The financial proceeds from this internal exchange, external trade, and hemp production allowed the American army regime to run budget surpluses every year with the exception of 1909, 1910, and 1912.59 This impressive revenue base, which departed significantly from the fiscal norms of other Filipino provinces, would seemingly secure Mindanao and Sulu with a solid underpinning for autonomy from the rest of the colony.

The Moro Province's steady drift away from the orbit of the Filipino colonial political economy did not go unnoticed. As the gap between the structures of government in the Christian and Muslim regions of the Philippines widened, and as Christian Filipinos began organizing their own networks of influence that joined provincial villages and Manila into one seamless web of patronage, ambitious ilustrados issued more and more strident protests of indignation.60 From 1903 through 1914, Filipinos in Luzon and the Visayans progressively occupied a greater role in the government of the archipelago. The formation of a unicameral Filipino legislature in Manila represented only the most visible and dramatic manifestation of the trend toward self-rule, albeit self-rule by a landed oligarchy.61 Moreover, the military presence in the archipelago, though still large, abated considerably and exercised less power over daily Filipino life. The Moro Province, by contrast, experienced none of these changes, as they did not vote for municipal representatives, did not play any part in selecting their own provincial governor, and did not send any legislators to Manila. When the Americans took the almost revolutionary step of allowing a legislature, it persisted in maintaining the Moro Province's status as a ward of the military. And as late as 1909, the military governor Tasker Bliss could baldly aver that "a purely civil government is quite impossible" in Sulu and Mindanao.62 This trend did not please Manila illustrados.

Although Patricio Abinales believes that ferment over the Muslim regions commenced in 1907,63 Manuel L. Quezon's 1912 broadside entitled "The Right of the Philippines to Independence " presents one of the earliest available documents illustrative of the Manila mindset. Above all, the article conveys the sense of insecurity that Mindanao and Sulu elicited amongst Filipino nationalists. Out of the four pages in "The Right of the Philippines," Quezon devoted fully one and a half to the "Problem of the 'Savages,'" and the "Moro Question."64 Why would Quezon, a shrewd progenitor of the Filipino political party system and the first President of the Filipino Commonwealth established in 1935, harp on such a superficially tangential topic? Part of the answer rests with a straightforward desire to aggrandize the status of Filipino elites. By stressing how "the Filipino Moros belong to the same race as the Christian Filipinos, namely the Malay" and "the tie of kinship would put a Filipino government into better position to govern the Moros than the American government," Quezon was making a bid to augment his political domain.65 In a related vein, the tantalizing possibility of boosting the number of bureaucratic patronage posts at his disposal probably figured into Quezon's thinking as well. But something else, something beyond the grubby realm of machine politics, also lay at the core of Quezon's argument.

Much of the argumentation in Quezon's polemic, and particularly his assertions of Filipino military and legal power, emanated from the contradictions of American policy. The United States promoted the idea of Philippines coherence through visual media like maps and an outwardly centralized juridical form, but it also simultaneously erected legal edifices that called this very integrality into question. In 1909, for instance, one of the leading geographers in the colonial establishment, William du Pre Smith, published an article with a map of the colony. (See Figure 1) The map projected an image to the world, pace Thongchai, of a unitary entity with Mindanao and Sulu as co-equal constituent parts. Yet the United States undermined not only the empirical, but also the juridical form of the Filipino nation with its bifurcated structure of government that placed Moroland beyond the purview of the Filipino legislature. In an international environment where nationalist imaginings required the field of the "geo-body," the separate American administration posed a real danger to the legitimacy and aspirations of Quezon's nationalist milieu. In his pleas for a common juridical framework, Quezon thus felt obligated to advance a case for the "empirical" capacity of the Filipinos to govern the Muslim South. Christian Filipinos should rule Moros not only because of their ties of kinship, but because they would deploy a more effective political and military presence than the Americans possibly could.

Figure 1: Map of the Philippines, from 1909 article written by Director of the Manila Bureau of Mines, "Geographical Work in the Philippines " 66

A Philippine independent government can govern the Moros at least as well as the United States is governing them today, if not better. The Moros are kept under subjection through the American army, and the actual contingent of United States troops in the territory inhabited by the said Moros is not more than 7,000. There is no doubt that the Philippine independent government could support a standing army of at least 30,000 men and could place in Mindanao one-third of this force to keep order among the Moros; but the Filipinos believe that this government of the Moros will meet with more sympathy on the part of the Moros.67

Manuel Quezon, "The Right of the Philippines to Independence,"

Some of the datu, or the Muslim leaders in Mindanao and Sulu ...for the first time fell under the sway of Manila politics and the developing Nacionalista party.

Beyond the efficacy of a hypothetical military force, Quezon also invoked the imperative of restoring a common system of law, observing that with regard to the issue of suffrage, "the Christian and non-Christian Filipinos alike, would stand on the same footing in the right of franchise. The laws on the subject would be general in character."68 Elsewhere, Gregorio Araneta, an ally of Quezon's in the legislature and a member of the Committee dealing with finance and justice, stated in much more punctilious terms the same imperative; namely, that uniform laws and standards of procedures should obtain for all the provinces:

If, therefore, the legislature of the Island of Negros was not empowered to repeal laws promulgated by the military governor of these islands, from whom it received its power, and the Commission may not confer upon the legislative council of the Moro Province greater powers than those conferred upon the legislature of the Island of Negros, it is plain that the Commission has no power to delegate to the Moro Province the right to amend or repeal the laws of the Commission.69

In other words, Araneta, Quezon, and others hoped to eliminate the legal exceptionality of Mindanao and Sulu and thereby definitively impose the writ of the Manila Legislature over those territories. By doing so, they could re-establish a consistent set of laws for the entirety of the Philippines and preserve the colony's sheen of juridical integrity.

One Last Hurrah for the Moro Province:
The Bacon Bill of 1926

As the Filipino legislature and Manila politicos exerted greater influence in the evolving colonial polity between 1907 and 1914, the distinct legal, political, and social position of the Moro Province became increasingly untenable. It posed too much of an affront to the ambitions of Filipino elites, and it offered too visible a symbol of how the nascent Filipino nation was not yet truly a nation. Agitation on the part of the Filipinos, in conjunction with transition in American leadership from the Republican to Democrat soon precipitated a dramatic shift of policy. In 1914, the new United States Governor General, Woodrow Wilson's appointee, Francis Burton Harrison, oversaw the dismantling of the Moro Province military regime, the establishment of a normalized Department of Mindanao and Sulu, and the general incorporation of the region into the regular legal framework of the Filipino nation.70 The Second Organic Act of 1916 codified this change, placing Mindanao and Sulu for the first time under the jurisdiction of the newly reorganized bicameral Filipino Congress.

Moreover, a number of de facto trends reinforced this de jure process of integration. Christian Filipinos inundated the Moro Province in part to staff the bureaucratic positions that proliferated in the region after 1914 and in part to take advantage of multiplying economic and agricultural opportunities.71 The incipient armed resistance to the Americans, though brought under manageable control by the 1909, waned even more. But most significant of all was the evolving role of the datu. Some of the datu, or the Muslim leaders in Mindanao and Sulu who Jeremy Beckett depicted as "one entitled to rule on account of his descent,"72 for the first time fell under the sway of Manila politics and the developing Nacionalista party. Patricio Abinales convincingly describes how one member of this aristocratic kinship grouping, Datu Piang, endeared himself to Manila caciques by supporting the new Department of Mindanao and Sulu and the expansion of Filipino public schools into the region. In return, Datu Piang won an appointment to the lower house of the Philippine Assembly and consolidated his control over lucrative patronage networks.73 While many datu refrained from participating in the world of Manila politics, the involvement of Piang and others still signaled a major shift in Muslim-Christian Filipino relations under American colonial rule.

In spite of the seemingly inexorable logic of integration, center-periphery relations encountered another enormous stumbling block in the 1920s. As the Republican Party regained power in the United States and American stalwarts of Muslim separateness like Leonard Wood returned to the Philippines as Governor-General in 1921, the colonial enthusiasm for the Department of Mindanao and Sulu and for an independent Philippines vanished. Instead, Wood pursued a strategy of intensifying the perception of Christian-Muslim difference by detailing conflicts in minute detail in his official reports and never missing a chance to emphasize Mindanao and Sulu's peculiar place in the archipelago.74 He also cultivated the support of datu who were antagonistic to Manila and its growing web of connections with the politics of the Muslim South. Wood's disruptive machinations culminated with a 1926 bill sponsored by his ally, Representative Robert Bacon, in the United States House of Representatives. Interested mainly in pleasing his backers both among rubber business interests and Leonard Wood's coterie,75 Bacon revisited the logic of pre-1914 policy by drafting an "independence bill." This bill, if enacted, would detach "the Moro Province " from the rest of the Philippines and maintain direct American control there.76

But beneath this placid surface, the dispute over the Bacon Bill and the history of American rule more generally left some problematic legacies in its wake.

Politicians in Manila, already accustomed to nearly a decade of accelerating integration, erupted in fury.77 How could the United States dare to sunder such a pivotal region from the Filipino nation? Numerous party leaders and nationalist figures took to the newspapers to decry the unspeakable calumny of this bill, with Speaker of the Assembly Manuel Roxas declaiming "we are at war" and Senator Camilo Osias lamenting "the nefarious scheme."78 It is also interesting to note that almost all of these bromides, in one way or another, appealed to an almost divine sense of the Filipino nation. Speaker Roxas for instance hoped that the massive protest rally in Manila against the Bacon Bill would spark "a renewed feeling of national consciousness" and "let us all fall behind the supreme national council which offers the only salvation for our country in this hour of trial."79 Senator Sergio Osmeña similarly spoke of how the Bacon Bill would "dismember the Philippine nation," and "destroy our unity."80 But more than any quotation, a picture inset from the June 19th issue of the Philippine Free Press evokes the sense of violence that many Filipinos believed the Bacon Bill would wreak on the Filipino "geo-body" and juridical form. (See Figure 2) With Mindanao present in its normal place on the Filipino map, but ominously blacked out, the illustration conveys the perceived wound that separation would inflict on the Filipino nation. Such images, as Thongchai discussed, can prove central to the idea of the nation and the mobilization of national sentiment. Maps like this then undoubtedly played a role in arousing the public to action.

The Bacon Bill, which amounted to the last hurrah of separatist sentiment in Mindanao and Sulu during the colonial, or for that matter, pre-World War II period, went down to defeat through the combined efforts of Manila politicians and their considerable number of allies in Washington. The bill's demise, finally, spelled the end of the United States' attachment to a distinct " Moro Province."81 Relations between Filipino nationalist bosses and local datu stabilized and ran a fairly harmonious course through the 1930s and the creation of the Commonwealth in 1935.82 This stability would endure straight through World War II, and the immediate post-war Republic faced its most pressing challenges not from Muslims, but from Communist Huk insurrectionists. But beneath this placid surface, the dispute over the Bacon Bill and the history of American rule more generally left some problematic legacies in its wake. The widespread datu embrace of what Abinales termed the American "restoration" embittered many Filipino nationalists and elicited a widespread sense of betrayal.83 Moreover, it set a precedent for keeping Muslims and Christians apart. These realities would remain a part of Mindanao and Sulu and return to haunt the Philippines after World War II.

In the 1960s and 70s, independence movements and violent separatist rebellions erupted with tremendous form in the Filipino South, shattering the relative calm that had prevailed in those areas at the conclusion of World War II. In the Philippines, the main exponent of "Moro" independence was the Moro National Liberation Front. Of course, to ascribe direct causality to the distant historical events of the first half of the century would constitute an error of teleological reasoning. Many circumstances have intervened to radically reconstitute the Southeast Asian cultural-political scene since the colonial era. In the Philippines, the migration of Christian settlers and the displacement of Muslims from the majority in Mindanao and Sulu transformed the social characteristic of the region. And the impact of weak states and rejuvenated strains of Global Islam have also served to alter the cultural landscape from its colonial incarnation. But to recognize the pivotal importance of post-war developments and political actors in Moro separatism does not require a dismissal of the pre-war past. It seems improbable that contemporary movements do not draw from the legacies of separate colonial administration, divide and rule policies, and the tortured efforts of nationalist movements to incorporate messy societies into the neat juridical and cartographic forms of the European state system. As such, this colonial history did not simply abet the creation of coterminous post-colonial states, as Benedict Anderson suggests. It also contributed to the creation of historically, and colonially (as opposed to primordially) grounded centrifugal impulses in the state system of the Southeast Asian world. And it should be recognized as such.

43 Patricio N. Abinales, Making Mindanao: Cotabato and Davao in the Formation of the Philippine Nation-State ( Quezon City : Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000), 19.

44 Amoroso, 121.

45 Quote from Gowing, 45.

46 Quote from ibid., 47.

47 Quote from ibid., 46.

48 David P. Barrows, "Report of the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes for the Year Ending August 31, 1902," Third Annual Report of the Philippine Commission, 1902, Part 1 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1903), 679.

49 See Glenn May, Social Engineering in the Philippines : The Aims, Execution, and Impact of American Colonial Policy (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981) among others.

56 See Abinales and Amoroso, 119-23: Military presence is not mentioned as an important component of state-building here

57 Abinales, 19-20.

58 Ibid., 21.

59 Ibid., 21

60 Ibid., 17.

61 Cullinane, 314.

62 Quote from Abinales, 17.

63 Ibid., 30.

64 Manuel Quezon, "The Right of the Philippines to Independence," The Filipino People 1, no. 2 (Oct. 1912), 1-5.

65 See Cullinane, 323: here there is discussion of the self-aggrandizing tendencies of Quezon.

66 Smith, 531

67 Quezon, 5.

68 Ibid., 5.

69 United States Bureau of Insular Affairs, Journal of the Philippine Commission Being a Special Section of the Second Philippine Legislature (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1911), 772.

70 Abinales, 31.

71 Ibid., 33.

72 Jeremy Beckett, "Political Families and Family Politics among the Muslim Maguindanaon of Cotabata," An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines, ed. Alfred W. McCoy (Madison: University of Wisconsin, Center for Southeast Asia Studies, 1982), 398.

Abinales, Patricio. "From Orang Besar to Colonial Big Man: Datu Piang of Cotabatu and the American Colonial State." Lives at the Margins: Biographies of Filipinos Obscure, Ordinary, and Heroic, ed. Alfred W. McCoy. Madison:Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, 2000. 193-228.

-------. Making Mindanao:Cotabato and Davao in the Formation of the Philippine Nation-State. Quezon City:Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000.

Amoroso, Donna. "Inheriting the 'Moro Problem': Muslim Authority and Colonial Rule in British Malaya and the Philippines." The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives, edited by Julian Go and Anne L. Foster. Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 2003. 148-181.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York:Verso Press, 1991.

Barrows, David P. "Report of the Chief of the Bureau of Non-Christian Tribes for the Year Ending August 31, 1902. Vol. 1, Third Annual Report of the Philippine Commission, 1902. Washington:Government Printing Office, 1903. 679- 688.

Quezon, Manuel L. "The Right of the Philippines to Independence." Filipino People 1, no. 2 (October 1912).

Saleeby, Najeem. "The Moro Problem: An Academic Discussion of the History and Solution of the Problem of the Government of the Moros of the Philippine Islands (1913)." Dansalan Quarterly 5, no. 1(1983): 8-42.